花斑鹟、猴子还是人?——评张贤亮《壹亿陆》

A REVIEW OF ZHANG XIANLIANG'S NEWEST NOVEL ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY MILLION

久蛰复出的作家张贤亮在长篇小说《壹亿陆》讲述了一个"人种危机"的故事。其中三个主要人物作为进城农民的代表在这篇小说中具有原型色彩。如花斑鹟一样使用生存繁衍策略的王草根、像猴子一样走"高级妓女"路线的陆姐以及面目模糊的具有自然人性质的"一亿陆",三个主人公的描写让人怀疑作家的创作动机。在这个充满了道德沦丧与价值观混乱的时代,我们需要的是作家、知识分子对现实困境的有力批判之声,而不是仅仅沉浸在语言快感中的闹剧,更不是一种借靠生物学的戏谑之说。

One of the most famous Chinese contemporary writers, Zhang Xianliang, has published his newest novel named One Hundred and Sixty Million in the famous journal Harvest. After a long retirement, Zhang Xianliang here narrates a story conceming ＂race crisis＂. The novel＇s three main characters have the stereotypical color of primitive people, farmers who have lost their land and are forced to migrate to a modern-day metropolis. The man adopts an ＂evolutionary strategy＂ like the pied flycatcher; the woman takes the ＂courtesan route＂ and is compared to a monkey; whereas the most important character in this novel, named ＂One Hundred and Sixty Million＂, appears simply as a blurry face, a technique used by the author to show us humanity in its natural state. The three main characters make us think about the writer＇s motivation for writing this novel. We live in the modem world, where moral bankruptcy and loss of basic values has been allowed to run rampant. Chinese contemporary writers thus have a mission to speak out powerfully and critically in response to the predicament of this modem reality, and not merely to immerse the reader in a farce built around language games or borrowed from biological theory.